Computer systems often deal with data sets composed of samples, such as the pixels of a bitmap image, the waveforms comprising the moments of an audio recording, or the recordings of a sensor device used in a technical setting. These samples are structured to provide quanta of information about the data set at a particular resolution, e.g., a bitmap comprising a 256-pixel-by-256-pixel block, where each pixel represents one color value. For a particular data set, e.g., a particular image, the resolution may be more coarsely or more finely defined. Higher-resolution data may portray the image with more information than lower-resolution data, but may also involve a greater volume of data to represent the image. For example, a particular data unit of a data set—e.g., a specific portion of a bitmap image—may be represented by higher-resolution samples, which provide more information but with more voluminous data, and also by lower-resolution samples, which provide less information but less voluminous data.
Computer systems may be configured to host multiple representations of a data set at various resolutions, e.g., both a low-resolution version of an image and a high-resolution version of the same image. In some instances, the computer systems may operate on a plurality of such data sets. For example, a computer system may fulfill a request for an image by providing a low-resolution version of the image. A user viewing the image may request to zoom in on a portion of the image, and the computer system may respond by accessing and illustrating the samples of the higher-resolution image comprising the zoomed-in portion of the image. The computer system may therefore operate on multiple-resolution samples of the data set while providing the service to the user.